Behind a 60-ton door, the nation’s largest working vault holds a treasure trove of items belonging to Pennsylvania residents, including a pair of diamond encrusted opera glasses, a gold Rolex watch, a small ivory carving, dueling pistols and a large trunk full of silver cups, with more cups hidden away in a drawer.

A look inside the vault was recently offered to some media outlets in an effort to draw attention to the mounds of unclaimed property that the state holds — before it is auctioned off.

“We’re trying to return $4.5 billion” in cash and goods, said Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity.

One in 10 people in Pennsylvania have unclaimed property sitting in the Treasury’s vault, Garrity said. The average claim is worth about $1,600, “which could go a long way to help some people,” she said.

Mirror photo by Rachel Foor / One of the unclaimed trunks filled with valuables sits inside the vault at the Pennsylvania Treasury.

In Blair County alone, 154,000 items valued at $17.6 million are unclaimed, according to data provided by press secretary Samantha Heckel.

Records also show that 58,000 items from Bedford County are valued at $4 million; 117,000 Cambria County items are worth $19.4 million; 185,000 Centre County items are worth $22.4 million; and 38,000 Huntingdon County items are valued at $3.8 million.

This past fiscal year, which ended June 30, Garrity said the Treasury hit an all-time record for giving money back.

“It’s close to $274 million,” she said. “I’m really proud of my team for that. Also, since I took office, we’ve given back 385 medals and memorabilia including three Bronze Stars and six Purple Hearts.”

Military memorabilia could be items such as dog tags or pins, Garrity said. A retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, Garrity said returning those items to their rightful owners or family members can become very personal.

“When we give back medals and memorabilia, we also send a proclamation from the Treasury basically thanking the veterans and their families for their service and sacrifice to our nation,” Garrity said.

While after three years in the vault, most of the valuables are auctioned off, military pieces are not a part of that process.

“We have the duty to try and get these returned to the veterans’ families,” Garrity said.

The vault

The state Treasury vault sits underground, beneath the treasurer’s office in the Finance Building in Harrisburg.

The vault itself is considered a treasure — built in 1939 with 400 tons of steel, the structure cost about $600,000 to build. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $13.1 million today.

Items aren’t strewn about in piles, instead the vault contains a wide hallway flanked on either side by three rooms, or cages. Each cage contains 145 large drawers and inside these drawers are a variety of items that come from abandoned safety deposit boxes and even old police evidence lockers.

There are also display cases in the vault hallway where items such as discharge papers from World War II, an old ration check for 2,000 pounds of sugar, a recommendation letter for Lyndon B. Johnson, a gavel from a Masonic temple, various political campaign buttons and an old American flag can be found.

Inside what Garrity called “more of our show-and-tell room” are more cases, along with instruments and open trunks. There’s a necklace with a large, diamond encrusted B pendant and a piece of jewelry that reads “chief” that contains 800 grams of gold, both from police evidence lockers, Garrity said.

“Then there’s a $1,000 Grover Cleveland bill, there’s a $500 McKinley,” Garrity said. “There’s some neat stuff.”

Because the treasury can’t hold on to everything, an online auction is held twice a year.

“We have another new record that we had the highest dollar auction, $285,000 in one auction,” she said.

Unclaimed property

The Treasury gets unclaimed property primarily in April, but it can come in anytime, Garrity said. “We get it constantly.”

When items arrive, Treasury workers inventory, barcode and catalog it, she said.

Information about the items is put into a database where reports can be run in a variety of ways — by county, alphabetical order or dollar amount, said Vault Manager Lori Hetick, adding information also includes where the items came from before arriving at the vault and where it is located in the vault.

That makes it easy to find pieces when people make a claim.

Many people don’t know how easy it is to let their property become unclaimed, Garrity said.

“If you don’t check in with your financial institution for three consecutive years, by statute, they have to accede it to the state, so to the PA Treasury,” Garrity said.

Unclaimed property isn’t all gold-encrusted treasure. Instead, “it could be an uncashed check,” she said. “People get royalty checks, rebate checks and maybe they just didn’t cash it, or it somehow got thrown away. It can be an old bank account that people forget about.”

Heckel said even she had unclaimed property.

“It was $20 from an old tax check,” she said. “But it was still surprising.”

Garrity said that there are “all kinds of things that people just don’t know that they have.”

To see if you might have unclaimed property, visit patreasury.gov, scroll down the page and click on “Search Our Database” under the Unclaimed Property heading.

Mirror Staff Writer Rachel Foor is at 814-946-7458.